Young Syrians on the first day of school this week at Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan: ‘The behaviour of the students is very aggressive,’ their principal says. ‘They hit each other for no reason. They destroy their school materials.”(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

The Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees is a sprawling settlement in the Jordanian desert.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

The children of Zaatari feel anything but secure.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Girls go to school in the morning, boys in the afternoon.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Much of the camp sits in sweltering silence broken only by the call to prayer sung five times a day.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Parts of Zaatari hum with commerce and children at play.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

The sun is relentless, forcing refugees to stay inside as much as possible.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Safe zones run by organizations such as International Medical Corps (IMC) and Save the Children supplement the schools by providing soccer fields, computer labs, art classes and other after-school activities.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Children finish their school day.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

How do the girls deal with the boys, who seem so angry and prone to violence? They avoid them.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

The girls are likely to isolate themselves as much as possible.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

A small arcade offers video games for just over 50 cents an hour. There are nine computers, but everyone is playing the same game, Counterstrike, which pits terrorists against counterterrorists.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

The key to rescuing the children will be re-establishing the sense they belong to something, whether a school, a sports or a cogent social order in the camp.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Zaatari’s desert location is so inhospitable that aid workers were in disbelief when it was initially offered to them.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Portable classes are surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Unicef classrooms have only 14,000 spots for 30,000 children.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

The camp is highly unsafe for women. Aid workers suspect violence is widespread within the crowded tents.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Children take part in different activities at the camp.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Children take part in different activities at the camp.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Teachers ask the children to draw pictures of their life in Syria.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Teachers ask the children to draw pictures of their life in Syria.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Ottawa native Dominique Hyde, Unicef’s top representative in Jordan, says that, because of the poor fundraising response, “we’re able to do the basics, but that’s it.”(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Soccer games easily turn violent, with team-building and sportsmanship often losing out to pushing, shoving and flying fists.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Teachers ask the children to draw pictures of their life in Syria.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

“We try to get them involved in activities the best that we can,” says a program officer with the International Medical Corps.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

Aid workers face fierce competition for the hearts and minds of the young refugees.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)

The learning environment is far from ideal.(Salah Malkawi for The Globe and Mail)